CONSUMER BEHAVIOR AND DECISON MAKING

The need to understand consumer behavior and its relevance in the development of both modern marketing theory and day-to-day managerial activity was the main stimulus to organize the workshop on “Consumer Behavior and Decision Making” of which this book is a compendium of the proceedings.The choice of this theme was due to the ever-growing relevance individual decision making processes have both in consumer behavior research and in other theoretical domains such as bargaining, organizational behavior, marketing and strategic management. The aim of the meeting was to create a sort of “international round table” with researchers and practitioners who, albeit with different points of view, are facing problems related to human judgement and choice, in general, and consumer behavior in particular. Even if I was aware of the different elements that can be taken into account when speaking about decision making I intentionally left the theme “general” in order to better shift from one perspective to another or from content based to methodological issues. Indeed, variety and variability of factors affecting purchase and consumption processes on the one hand and increasing information and the cognitive load managers daily have to deal with, on the other, highlight some explanatory limits of traditional marketing studies. Empirical evidence has thusfar fostered the efforts of scholars and practitioners towards research activity more strictly related with the nature of human behavior such as preference structure, the way people mentally represent a problem, the role of accountability, risk, ambiguity, heuristics. All of these studies are sheding light, albeit from different perspectives, on decision processes. The needs for new methodological tools and theoretical background has, moreover, enhanced the interaction between different disciplines such as psychology, economics and sociology. In this context individual difference variables, such as prior knowledge and expertise, characteristics of the decisions’ task and social context seem to be the main items researchers are working on to understand the nature of human behavior.